Mouse Country

I’ve always had a weird relationship with Walt Disney World, having grown up here in Orlando and being surrounded by theme park business in so many facets of life.  Nearly everyone in my family has, at some point, worked for Disney and I couldn’t tell you how many times we went to the parks.  Yeah, I’ve been in the tunnel.  The rides were cool and it was fun stuff for a kid, but as I entered my teens my attitude shifted and suddenly the Mouse was lame.  Corporations suck, right?!

Sooner or later every resident of Central Florida has to admit that tourism is the lifeblood of the area, and we would still be some backwater orange grove without Walt Disney.  For me, I moved past the teenaged angst and have come to accept, but not love, That Part of town.  There are parts of the parks and resorts that are intensely nostalgic to me, and even though the area is in a constant state of updates, changes, demolitions and upgrades, many of those locations are still intact.

This week I’ve been afforded the gift of FREE TIME, and have chose to spend it by driving around the WDW resort property.  It’s amazing how much there really is to take in behind the scenes.  This all began when I randomly saw a post about the STOLPort on Disney property.  Short story is that there used to be an airplane landing strip so that private planes could land at Disney instead of the Orlando Airport.  The rumors have been around forever but I never actually knew where it was supposed to be.  Thanks to the post online, I saw a photo of the runway in all it’s former glory and realized that I knew exactly where it was!  Thus I decided to head over there and check it out.

What I found in the present day is an old strip of road that is being used as a dumping group for all kinds of mechanical equipment and supplies.  Tractor trailers, piles of metal, construction equipment, trash bins and dumpsters, broken down trucks, you name it.  A little underwhelming to be honest, but it’s a fun piece of Disney history.

All this brings me to the fact that I’ve got one roll of film in my camera that I’ve been using as an experiment – a roll of Kodak Ultramax 400, being redscaled.  This is new to me and I’ve never tried it before, but thanks to a post from a friend online I learned that redscaling is the process of taking your roll of color film and flipping it so that you’re exposing the back of the film first.  Essentially hitting the different layers of film in reverse order so that the color shifts to various shades of red, orange and pink.

I brought this roll with me to see what interesting stuff I could find in the back roads and employee-only areas of Disney  that are actually accessible to any ol’ tourist in their car.  Spent a bunch of time looking at Google Maps to refresh my memory on what’s out there.  Found some old stuff that rekindled fond memories, plus discovered new things that will be fun to go explore at a later date.

The good news is that I just finished up the roll earlier today, I can’t wait to get it developed and see what comes out!  There’s plenty more out there to snap some photos of.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *